The Annoying Phenomenon of TikTok

Tik-Tok logo

By: Roberto Ruiz, Opinion Reporter

TikTok has taken over the Snapchat and, more importantly, YouTube advertisements. While most of us are primed to see a video on whatever we enjoy, we’re hit with a grating, annoying ad that TikTok has chosen to grace our screens.

TikTok is effectively the popular app Musical.ly reformulated by a Chinese app developer. For those not in the know, the app allows users to lip-sync. That’s it. However, while the old app spread by word of mouth and the occasional ad, the Chinese developers of TikTok (Douyin in China) have opted for an aggressive, annoying, and unpopular set of ads in which they take their users content for use. When I brought up the mere topic of TikTok, one of my peers said “Oh, God.” Not exactly a cheery response.

Why am I writing on such an unimportant topic? There’s definitely more pressing issues, but TikTok is just so amazingly annoying that it warrants an angry opinion piece.

Ultimately, though, I hate less that this company is so brazenly annoying, and more that everyone just accepts these boring ad campaigns as part of it all.

This is life now, I guess. We just have to go with some random company shoving a vapid rip-off of Vine in our face (which itself was not without its controversies) and not care.

Now, to be fair, there is a simple solution, but neither you nor I will follow through with it: don’t watch YouTube or use Snapchat. Impossible, right?

Ultimately, I think that too plays into why companies feel less the need to think of anything. Long gone are the days of magazine Volkswagen ads, because those ads required wit. Because both you and I will literally just watch anything and will be pulled in by the most basic things, these companies feel fine posting these nagging ads.

However, I’m here writing this, so the campaign is clearly working. As long as we watch our friends stories on Snapchat or watch a video on YouTube, we’re going to have to live with the lovechild of modern internet culture and a large Chinese firm gone wild.

It’s an annoying reality, but one nonetheless.

 

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